"A Myth of Innocence"

One summer she goes into the field as usual stopping for a bit at the pool where she often looks at herself, to see if she detects any changes. She sees the same person, the horrible mantle of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close. That's my uncle spying again, she thinks—everything in nature is in some way her relative.I am never alone, she thinks, turning the thought into a prayer. Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymorehow beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers. Also that he embraced her, right there, with her uncle watching. She rememberssunlight flashing on his bare arms.

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This is the last moment she remembers clearly. Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly, the chilling insight that from this momentshe couldn't live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the poolwill never return. A woman will return, looking for the girl she was.

She stands by the pool saying, from time to time, I was abducted, but it soundswrong to her, nothing like what she felt. Then she says, I was not abducted. Then she says, I offered myself, I wantedto escape my body. Even, sometimes, I willed this. But ignorance

cannot will knowledge. Ignorancewills something imagined, which it believes exists.

All the different nouns—she says them in rotation. Death, husband, god, stranger.Everything sounds so simple, so conventional. I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.

She can't remember herself as that personbut she keeps thinking the pool will rememberand explain to her the meaning of her prayerso she can understandwhether it was answered or not.